Digital video recorders allow users to store television programs, movies and other content for archival and subsequent viewing. The capacity of recording mediums of some digital video recorders (DVRs) allows for the storage of hundreds of hours of content which changes on a daily basis as users delete content and request recording of new content by the DVR. One problem with DVRs is that the associated recording mediums occasionally fail, causing a user to lose access to their recorded content. This is frustrating for the user, because it may take time to re-record the content during subsequent rebroadcasts of the content. It is even more frustrating for the user to lose some content which will be infrequently or never rebroadcast again.